Known issue: BICs connections not releasing during Scheduling workflow.

If you’ve ever monitored the connection from your Adaptive Processing Server (the one that hosts the DSL Bridge) closely enough, you may have noticed some rogue connections to your BW servers.

Up until a few months ago, we just assumed that these were active connections for reports that were currently open and processing.  During some internally testing, we noticed that the following workflow causes connections to be opened, but not closed, until the Webi Session times out.

1. Login to BI Launchpad
2. Click “Schedule” for a BICs based Web Intelligence Document (one with prompts)
3. In the Schedule dialog, click on Prompts and wait for the prompts dialog to come up
4. At this point, a connection is created to the BW server to get the prompt information needed to create this dialog.
5. Using something like Process Explorer to monitor the TCP/IP connections that a process has open will show this quite easily as my screenshot below demonstrates.
6. Cancel the schedule dialog and run through steps 2-5 again.  Notice the connections increase with each schedule.

This issue is currently tracked as:  ADAPT01694500 and is slated to be fixed in SP08.

The connections will release on their own after the default 20 minute timeout OR if the Webi Report Server recycles.  This can cause connectivity issues to the BW server though so you may want to watch out for this in your system.

A Knowledge Base Article will be written with more details on this issue in the next few days.  I just wanted to get this out ASAP to make heavy schedulers aware that this issue may exist.

UPDATE: http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1903067 has been written.  Should be resolved for certain workflows in BI 4.0 SP08 and BI 4.1 SP02

Thanks

Jb

Platinum Support Engineer – SAP – Web Intelligence Support.